Lula has always been an inveterate optimist to the point of going overboard, like when in one of his past governments he boasted that the poor in Brazil were already traveling by plane and going to spend the summer in Argentina.
In this his third term, more mature in age and experience, including his year and a half in prison, the former union member seems more cautious, although without losing his proverbial optimism.
Faced with the problems, converted into numbers, that this country, full of contrasts, is going through, Lula has just stated: “We know that next year looks difficult, but we are not going to stand still and wait for the bad news to arrive.”
For Lula, who inherited the motto “spending is life” from Dilma Rousseff, his great concern is the economy and the contrasts that Brazil presents between its great capacity to create wealth and its waste that fails to reach millions of people. who still live in poverty.
Some reliable figures from international institutions, collected by Fausto Macedo in the newspaper, are enough. or state from São Paulo. Brazil is today, for example, the ninth largest economy on the planet with a GDP of two trillion dollars, but its public services continue to lack quality. At the same time, it suffers from one of the highest tax burdens in the world, occupying 14th place. Its current tax burden is: 33.71% against 16% in Japan, 18.9% in China and 24% in the United States. At the same time, Brazil appears in 87th place on the UN Human Rights index. And on the delicate issue of education, the country has not quite started in the Pisa indices where it appears in 64th place among the 70 countries with the largest world economy. In science, Brazil appears in 63rd place, 59th in reading and 66th in mathematics, lower than the indexes of Chile, Uruguay, Colombia or Peru.
If it is true that in this first year of his third presidential term, Lula has returned to Brazil its prestige lost abroad during the years of Bolsonarism, it is no less true than his task in rebalancing the distribution of wealth. This is your Achilles curtain.
And in the field of economics his task will not be easy as he himself confesses. Hence his pluses and minuses these days in relation to the revolutionary projects of his Minister of Economy, Fernando Haddad, who seeks for the first time a fiscal balance between income and spending. Not spending more than what is collected, but not less either, which means a thorough reform of taxes that are currently totally unbalanced, since those who earn the most contribute less to the State. It is the eternal struggle to make large fortunes pay taxes.
Lula knows very well that he can do little in favor of the new economic revolution without having a majority in Congress, today in the hands of the Bolsonarist right.
Lula also knows that the millions of poor people who voted for him again want to be able to end the month without going into debt, to stop suffering from the inflation that torments them and to be able to have decent public services.
Hence, Lula is fighting even against the most severe left of his Government and his own party, the PT. And he insists on dedicating millions to visible public works and social spending, even if it is at the cost of unbalancing the accounts.
What Lula has not changed, although sometimes he seems more nervous than in his previous governments, is his ability to dialogue with opposition forces, to negotiate even with his political adversaries. He is a confirmed pragmatist, much less than an ideologue. Hence why he is sometimes accused of being reckless.
At this moment, perhaps the most difficult of his already long political career, Lula is challenging his ability to negotiate with the same political opposition. In this case with the most conservative forces of the Bolsonaro extreme right in Congress, to which he is handing over a good part of the ministries and positions of the State. But Lula knows that Brazilian politics is like that and always has been. It was precisely the difficulty that he encountered since his first presidential victory of being able to count on a Congress that was hostile to him that dragged him into what has been vulgarly called “buying” the deputies and their parties in Congress, which gave rise to the two major corruption scandals that dragged him to jail.
Today Lula knows that he cannot repeat his past mistakes, although despite this he is searching for new, more democratic forms of dialogue with the opposition in Congress and the Senate, at the cost of sometimes being accused of excessive generosity in the distribution of responsibilities to the orphans of Bolsonarism.
Hence, Lula has announced that, after his great foreign activism with which he has visited half the planet, “he will dedicate himself to touring the country.” This is to prepare for next year’s municipal elections, which could be fundamental for her own government, since in them Bolsonarism remains strong and still monopolizes the vast majority of local power.
The engineer Samuel Hanan, specialized in macroeconomics, in his not very optimistic book, titled Brazil, a country adrift and roads for a country without direction“, writes: “The Brazilian cannot and does not deserve to be condemned to an entire life marked by unsuppressed basic needs, by insecurity, by the feeling of impunity, by the discredit of politicians and by regional and social inequalities that seem insurmountable. ”. And he adds: “Brazil is in a hurry.”
It is Brazil’s rush to get out of its unjust situation as a country among the richest in the world and the most socially unequal, which makes Lula seem nervous. Nervous and eager to be able to offer the world, without euphemisms, a country that can dream again not only of being a country of the future, but of a present that honors the famous slogan that “God is Brazilian.” It would be a lot if the fifth largest country on the planet could present social indices of which it would not have to be ashamed.
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